Chamber Music New Zealand Presents

NZTRIO, BEETHOVEN reCYCLE with MICHAEL HOUSTOUN, EINSTEIN’S UNIVERSE, GOLDNER STRING QUARTET with PIERS LANE and more!

Enjoy a year full of chamber music featuring new commissions from New Zealand composers Claire Cowan, Ross Harris, Samuel Holloway and Gareth Farr, alongside music from Bright Sheng to Shostakovich.

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1Kronos Quartet

The Wellington concert is being recorded for broadcast by Radio NZ Concert

Welcome

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the opening concert of our 2013 Kaleidoscopes concert season.

We open with a daring programme of new music, performed by the group that has redefi ned the string quartet genre over the past 40 years. Kronos Quartet has been to New Zealand before but this will be their fi rst visit to the South Island.

Tonight’s concert features music from some of the world’s greatest living composers. Kronos enjoy a close association with Kiwi composer Jack Body and we are delighted that they have chosen to include one of his works in their programme.

This national tour has been made possible through our association with Auckland Arts Festival and by arrangement with Arts Projects Australia.

Thanks for joining us and we look forward to welcoming you back throughout the year to our bumper season of chamber music.

I invite you to expect the unexpected and come with us on a journey to the heart of new music now!

Euan MurdochChief ExecutiveChamber Music New Zealand

Programme

Omar Souleyman (arr. Garchik)La Sidounak Sayyada 4

Ram Narayan (arr. Kronos, transc. Ljova) Raga Mishra Bhairavi: Alap 4

Nicole LizéeDeath to Kosmische 5

Jack BodyArum Manis 6

Valentin SilvestrovString Quartet No 3 7

INTERVAL

Steve ReichWTC 9/11 8

Aleksandra Vrebalov… hold me, neighbor, in this storm … 10

Wellington 11 MarchDunedin 13 MarchChristchurch 14 March

Please respect the music, the musicians, and your fellow audience members, by switching off all cellphones, pagers and watches. Taking photographs, or sound or video recordings during the concert is strictly prohibited unless with the prior approval of Chamber Music New Zealand.

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750 new pieces for Kronos to perform, many of which they have recorded on their extensive and eclectic discography. In 2003 the Kronos: Under 30 Project was set up and has enabled quartet members to work intensively with selected young composers while they write new works for the group. More recently, Kronos has also been mentoring young string quartets under the auspices of the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall.

Many international awards have been given to the Kronos Quartet, most recently the Polar Music Prize and Avery Fisher Prize, both in 2011. This is Kronos’s fourth visit to New Zealand: they performed at the NZ International Festival in 1990 and 1996, and for Chamber Music New Zealand and WOMAD in 2005.

Since it was formed nearly 40 years ago, the Kronos Quartet has been one of the world’s most infl uential chamber music groups, extending the appeal of the string quartet well beyond traditional concert hall audiences. The group performs works by established contemporary composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, John Adams and Alfred Schnittke, alongside new voices drawn from the younger generation of western classical composers, and from musicians from other genres (including jazz and rock) and other traditions (such as a Chinese pipa player, Bollywood singer, Inuit throat singer, and Romanian gypsy band).

Expanding the string quartet repertoire has been an important part of the Kronos mission. The Kronos Performing Arts Association has commissioned more than

Kronos QuartetDavid Harrington violinJohn Sherba violinHank Dutt violaJeff rey Zeigler cello

Laurence Neff Lighting DesignerScott Fraser Sound Designer

4 Chamber Music New Zealand

Omar Souleymanborn near ras al ain, syria, 1966

La Sidounak SayyadaOmar Souleyman is a Syrian musical legend. Since 1994, he and his musicians have been a staple of folk-pop throughout Syria, issuing more than 500 studio and live-recorded albums. He was born in rural Northeastern Syria, and the musical traditions of the region are evident in his music: classical Arabic mawal-style vocalisation, Syrian Dabke (the regional folkloric dance and party music), Iraqi Choubi, and a host of Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish styles. His popularity has risen steadily and his group performs concerts throughout Syria and in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Lebanon.

Trombonist and composer Jacob Garchik, born in San Francisco, has lived in New York since 1994. Since 2006 he has contributed dozens of arrangements and transcriptions for the Kronos Quartet of music from all over the world. Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of La Sidounak Sayyada was commissioned for them by the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

La Sidounak Sayyada translates as ‘I’ll Prevent the Hunters from Hunting You’, and is a song to a new lover.

Ram Narayanborn udaipur, rajasthan, 1927

Raga Mishra Bhairavi: AlapRam Narayan is one of the world’s most revered masters of the sarangi, the bowed string instrument from northern India, and has been responsible for bringing it into the foreground of classical Hindustani music. He began learning the sarangi as a child from his father, and in 1947 moved to Delhi to work as a musician at All India Radio. Like most sarangi players of the era, he was a vocal accompanist only; however, he soon realised its solo potential and pushed to bring his performances into the spotlight—a practice unheard of at the time. In the early 1950s his ragas were some of the fi rst to be recorded on LPs produced in India, and since then he has received numerous awards, including the Sangeet Natak Academy Award, the highest honour issued in India for dance, music and theatre.

Ram Narayan is known for his vivid interpretations of traditional Indian ragas. Each raga (a specifi ed combination of notes played and embellished within a framework called a thaat) has the power to evoke a unique emotional transcendence.

Tonight’s arrangement of Raga Mishra Bhairavi was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Deborah and Creig Hoyt in memory of Raymond Frase. It is based on a performance by Ram Narayan, recorded in 1989, and was transcribed by Ljova and arranged by Kronos Quartet.

5Kronos Quartet

Nicole Lizée born gravelbourg, saskatchewan, 1973

Death to KosmischeNicole Lizée studied both piano and composition at Brandon University, Manitoba, and composition at McGill University in Montreal. The year after she graduated her work Left Brain/Right Brain was chosen as Canada’s representative at the ISCM World Music Days in Germany, and that same year she was awarded the Robert Fleming Prize by the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2010 she was awarded a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, for a residency in Italy.

Her compositions range from large-scale works for orchestra and soloists to chamber music, and she regularly includes unusual instruments such as turntables, video games and karaoke tapes in her ensembles. In 2012 she was commissioned by the BBC Proms to write a second work for the Kronos Quartet, The Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop.

Death to Kosmische was her fi rst string quartet, and was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Margaret Dorfman and the Ralph I Dorfman Family Fund in 2011. In addition to their usual instruments, the performers play a stylophone (miniature analogue synthesiser invented in 1967, operated by touching it with a stylus) and omnichord (an electronic version of an autoharp or zither, developed in 1981).

The composer writes:

“Death to Kosmische is a work that refl ects my fascination with the notion of musical hauntology and the residual perception of music, as well as my love/hate relationship with the idea of genres. The musical elements of the piece could be construed as the faded and twisted remnants of the Kosmische style of electronic music. To do this, I have incorporated two archaic pieces of music technology (the Stylophone and the Omnichord) and have presented them through the gauze of echoes and reverberation, as well as through imitations of this technology as played by the strings. I think of the work as both a distillation and an expansion of one or several memories of music that are irrevocably altered by the impermanence of the mind. Only ghosts remain.”

6 Chamber Music New Zealand

Jack Body born te aroha, 1944

Arum ManisJack Body studied composition at the University of Auckland with Ronald Tremain and Robin Maconie, and further study in Europe followed with Mauricio Kagel in Cologne and Gottfried Michael Koenig in Utrecht. During 1976-77, he was guest lecturer at the Akademi Musik Indonesia, Yogyakarta, and in 1980 was appointed to the staff of the Music Department at Victoria University of Wellington. Besides numerous works for conventional musical forces, Body has had a continuing interest in tape composition, mixed-media works and music-theatre, including new formats for the presentation of contemporary music.

Body’s music has been infl uenced by the music and cultures of Asia, particularly Indonesia, where he has carried out several projects documenting traditional music. His music has won many awards and has been widely performed and broadcast both in New Zealand and overseas. He has been represented numerous times at the UNESCO Rostrum of Composers and at the UNESCO Forum for Asian Music.

Arum Manis, for string quartet and tape, was written in 1991 for the Kronos Quartet and presented at the 1996 International Rostrum of Composers.

The composer writes:

“[Arum manis] is the Indonesian term for candy fl oss and means literally ‘fragrant, sweet.’ The original recording which forms the basis of the tape is the sound of a two-stringed fi ddle played by an Indonesian seller of candy fl oss. I recorded him in 1977 in Bangkalan, on Madura, the island adjacent to the port of Surabaya. Carrying the already-made candy fl oss in a bin hung from his shoulder, he played his so-called ‘rehab’ to advertise his presence. The music was a medley, sometimes recognisable tunes, sometimes mere improvisation. My piece, I hope, refl ects something of the quality of candy fl oss – light and airy, not substantial food, perhaps, but pink and sweet and leaving us with a pleasurable aftertaste.”

7Kronos Quartet

Valentin Silvestrovborn kiev, 30 september 1937

String Quartet No 3I. Präludium / PreludeII. PastoraleIII. IntermezzoIV. IntermezzoV. SerenadeVI. IntermezzoVII. Postludium / Postlude

Pianist and composer Valentin Silvestrov studied at the Kiev Conservatory after training to be a civil engineer, and has been held in high regard by fellow composers Arvo Pärt and Alfred Schnittke. Although he was awarded the Koussevitzky Prize in 1967 and achieved critical acclaim for his compositions in the West, his modernist style of composition was not appreciated in his homeland, and in 1974 he withdrew from public view to avoid being expelled from the Soviet Composers Union.

During the 1980s, an increasing interest in his music led to positions as visiting composer at the Almeida Music Festival, London in 1989, and the Lockenhaus Festival, Austria in 1990. The following decade his music became widely performed in Russia and the Ukraine, and in 1998 a festival and conference was held in Kiev to celebrate his 60th birthday.

His early music was serial and strictly atonal, but in the 1970s he shifted to a melodically-inspired ‘lyrical avant-garde’ style. He has

described it a ‘meta-music’, a shortening of the term ‘metaphorical music’, and sees his compositions as not new music, but an extension of all previous music.

He has written a wide range of music, including eight symphonies, choral works, songs and chamber music, several of which have been recorded on the ECM New Series label.

Silvestrov’s String Quartet No 3 was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the Columbia Foundation and the Kronos Performing Arts Association, and premièred in London on 27 January 2012.

8 Chamber Music New Zealand

Steve Reichborn new york, 3 october 1936

WTC 9/111. 9/11/012. 20103. WTC

Steve Reich is celebrated as one of the 20th century’s most innovative composers, and his work has had a major infl uence on younger colleagues such as John Adams. After graduating with a philosophy degree, Reich studied at Juilliard School with Bergsma and Persichetti, and in California with Berio and Milhaud. He has also been infl uenced by his studies of African drumming, Balinese gamelan and Jewish cantillation, as well as jazz. Rhythm has particularly fascinated him, and he adopted the ‘minimalist’ approach promoted by Terry Riley. Early successes included works for tape (or tape loops) that created rhythmic patterns that shifted in and out of focus with each other, but he gradually refi ned this idea to enable human musicians to perform his music. During the 1970s, melody became more important in his writing and one of the fi rst works to express that was Diff erent Trains. Written for the Kronos Quartet and tape, it won a Grammy Award in 1990.

Other honours awarded to Reich include a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, the Polar Prize (Sweden) in 2007, and the Premium Imperial Award (Japan) in 2006.

WTC 9/11 is the third string quartet Reich has written for the Kronos Quartet, and was commissioned by the Barbican (London),

Carnegie Hall, Duke University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the Phyllis C Wattis Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The commission was also made possible by the Chamber Music America Commissioning Program, with funding generously provided by The Andrew W Mellon Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.

The composer writes:

“In 2009 the Kronos Quartet asked me for a piece using pre-recorded voices [….] several months after Kronos asked me for the piece, I realized the pre-recorded voices would be from 9/11. Specifi cally, they would start from publicly accessible recordings by the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the New York City Fire Department, and then from interviews with former friends and neighbors who lived or worked in lower Manhattan.

‘WTC’ is also an abbreviation for ‘World to Come,’ as my friend composer David Lang pointed out. After 9/11 the bodies and parts of bodies were taken to the Medical Examiner’s offi ce on the east side of Manhattan. In Jewish tradition there is an

9Kronos Quartet

obligation to guard the body from the time of death until burial. The practice, called Shmira, consists of sitting near the body and reciting Psalms or Biblical passages. The roots of the practice are, on one level, to protect the body from animals or insects, and on another, to keep the neshama, or soul, company while it hovers over the body until burial. Because of the diffi culties in DNA identifi cation, this went on for seven months, 24/7. Two of the women who sat and recited Psalms are heard in the third movement. You will also hear a cellist (who has sat Shmira elsewhere) and a cantor from a major New York City synagogue sing parts of Psalms and the Torah.

WTC 9/11 is in three movements (though the tempo remains unchanged throughout). The piece begins and ends with the fi rst violin doubling the loud warning beep (actually an F) your phone makes when it is left off the hook. In the fi rst movement there are archive voices from NORAD air traffi c controllers, alarmed that American Airlines Flight 11 was off course. This was the fi rst plane to deliberately crash into the World Trade Center. The movement then shifts to the FDNY archives of that day telling what happened on the ground.

The second movement uses recordings I made in 2010 of neighborhood residents, an offi cer of the Fire Department and the fi rst ambulance driver (from Hatzalah volunteers) to arrive at the scene, remembering what happened nine years earlier. The third and last movement uses the voices of a neighborhood resident, two volunteers who took shifts sitting near the bodies, and the cellist/singer and cantor mentioned above.

Throughout WTC 9/11 the strings double and harmonize the speech melodies and prolonged vowels or consonants of the recorded voices. You will hear a total of three string quartets, one live, and two pre-recorded. The piece can also be played by three live quartets and pre-recorded voices. WTC 9/11 is only 15 and a half minutes long. While composing it I often tried to make it longer, and each time it felt that extending its length reduced its impact. The piece wanted to be terse.”

10 Chamber Music New Zealand

Aleksandra Vrebalovborn novi sad, 22 september 1970

… hold me, neighbor, in this storm …Aleksandra Vrebalov, a native of the former Yugoslavia, left Serbia in 1995 and continued her education in the United States. She studied at the University of Michigan with Evan Chambers and Michael Daugherty, and the San Francisco Conservatory with Elinor Armer. She now teaches at the City College of New York. Her music has been recorded for Nonesuch and Vienna Modern Masters, and performed by the Kronos Quartet, Dusan Tynek Dance Company, Ijsbreker, and the Moravian Philharmonic, among others. In 2005, her orchestral work Orbits opened the 30th Novi Sad Music Festivities and was broadcast live on Serbian television. In 2012 she was awarded the Mokranjac Prize by the Serbian Composers Association for her opera Mileva.

… hold me, neighbor, in this storm … was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Carnegie Hall and by the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at Maryland with funds from The Leading College and University Presenters Program of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, with support from The James Irvine Foundation.

The composer writes:

“The Balkans, with its multitude of cultural and religious identities, has had a troubled history of ethnic intolerance [....] As I write this in November 2007, on YouTube a new generation of Albanians and Serbs post their war-songs bracing for another confl ict, claiming their separate entitlements to the land and history, rather than a diff erent kind of future, together.

Strangely, the cultural and religious diff erences that led to enmity in everyday life produced—after centuries of turbulently living together—most incredible fusions in music. It is almost as if what we weren’t able to achieve through words and deeds—to fuse, and mix, and become something better and richer together—our music so famously accomplished instead.

[This work] is inspired by folk and religious music from the region, whose insistent rhythms and harmonies create a sense of inevitability, a ritual trance with an obsessive, dark energy. Peaceful passages of the work grew out of the delicately curved, elusive, often microtonal melodies of prayers, as well as escapist tavern songs from the region, as my grandmother remembers them.

For me, …hold me, neighbor… is a way to bring together the sounds of the church bells of Serbian orthodox monasteries and the Islamic calls for prayer. It is a way to connect histories and places by unifying one of the most civilized sounds of Western classical music—that of the string quartet—with ethnic Balkan instruments, the gusle [a bowed string instrument] and tapan [large double-headed drum]. It is a way to piece together our identities fractured by centuries of intolerance, and to reach out and celebrate the land so rich in its diversity, the land that would be ashen, empty, sallow, if any one of us, all so diff erent, weren’t there.”

For the Kronos Quartet/Kronos Performing Arts Association:Janet CowperthwaiteManaging Director

Laird RodetAssociate Director

Matthew CampbellStrategic Initiatives Director

Sidney ChenArtistic Administrator

Scott FraserSound Designer

Christina JohnsonCommunications and New Media Manager

Nikolás McConnie-SaadOffi ce Manager

Hannah Neff Production Associate

Laurence Neff Production Director

Lucinda ToyBusiness Operations Manager

Contact:Kronos Quartet/Kronos Performing Arts AssociationP. O. Box 225340 San Francisco, CA 94122-5340 USA

www.kronosquartet.orgwww.facebook.com/kronosquartetwww.myspace.com/kronosquartetTwitter: @kronosquartet #kronos

The Kronos Quartet records for Nonesuch Records

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12 Chamber Music New Zealand

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Regional Presenters Blenheim, Cromwell, Gisborne, Gore, Hutt Valley, Kaitaia, Morrinsville, Motueka, Rotorua, Taihape, Tauranga, Te Awamutu, Tokoroa, Upper Hutt, Waikanae, Waimakariri, Waipukurau, Wanaka, Wanganui, Warkworth, Wellington, Whakatane and Whangarei.

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© Chamber Music New Zealand 2013 No part of this programme may be reproduced without the prior permission of Chamber Music New Zealand.

Regional ConcertsNew Zealand Guitar QuartetGisborne, 5 AprilWhakatane, 7 AprilRotorua, 8 AprilWanaka, 16 AprilCromwell, 17 AprilLower Hutt, 24 AprilWaikanae, 19 May

Tres Cordes (string trio)Christchurch, 27 AprilBlenheim, 10 MayRotorua, 19 MayAkaroa, 2 JuneAshburton, 9 June

Category Five (wind ensemble)Te Awamutu, 27 AprilWhanganui, 28 April

Sergey Malov (violin/viola/viola da spalla)Whangarei, 28 MayUpper Hutt, 7 June

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